Moby Dick: or, the White Whale eBook

It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there
in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx’s
in the desert. “Speak, thou vast and venerable
head,” muttered Ahab, “which, though ungarnished
with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with
mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret
thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast
dived the deepest. That head upon which the
upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world’s
foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies
rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her
murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with
bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful
water-land, there was thy most familiar home.
Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast
slept by many a sailor’s side, where sleepless
mothers would give their lives to lay them down.
Thou saw’st the locked lovers when leaping from
their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath
the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven
seemed false to them. Thou saw’st the murdered
mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck;
for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the
insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed—­
while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship
that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched,
longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to
split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham,
and not one syllable is thine!”

“Three points on the starboard bow, sir, and
bringing down her breeze to us!

“Better and better, man. Would now St.
Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness
bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man!
how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies;
not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but
has its cunning duplicate in mind.”

CHAPTER 71

The Jeroboam’s Story

Hand in hand, ship and breeze blew on; but the breeze
came faster than the ship, and soon the Pequod began
to rock.

By and by, through the glass the stranger’s
boats and manned mast-heads proved her a whale-ship.
But as she was so far to windward, and shooting by,
apparently making a passage to some other ground,
the Pequod could not hope to reach her. So the
signal was set to see what response would be made.

Here be it said, that like the vessels of military
marines, the ships of the American Whale Fleet have
each a private signal; all which signals being collected
in a book with the names of the respective vessels
attached, every captain is provided with it.
Thereby, the whale commanders are enabled to recognise
each other upon the ocean, even at considerable distance,
and with no small facility.